Well, with the advent of search engines like Google that rate sites according to the number of incoming links, it seems important that we actually link to the sites we like.

So here are some links to the software I like. If you are looking for a new editor, a new window manager, whatever, perhaps you can give one of them a try.

I also want to keep a list of links to the software I really need in case I have to reinstall my system.

The One And Only editor is Emacs! I found that mcedit – the editor for the MidnightCommander – can be used stand alone. When I am root, I use it. Simple, yet powerful. And it reminds me of my days with Norton Commander in 1990, on 286 with 8MHz and a Turbo button to boost it up to 12MHz. I lived in Bangkok, Thailand, at the time. Whee!

My mail and news client these days is GMail. Before that I used ThunderBird, and before that I used Gnus within Emacs.

My shell is the EmacsShell. Outside of Emacs I prefer to use bash. I usually do that when I want to be root, or when I type tricky command lines involving lots of piping and may have encoding issues.

For IM I use Adium and Gaim. I used to use an IRC client and BitlBee to connect to the ICQ, AIM, and Jabber networks, but not anymore.

My IRC client is rcirc within Emacs. I used ERC before. Outside of Emacs, I use irssi or my IM client.

I run my shell in a terminal emulator. Before settling on OSX’s Terminal.app (which has issues with ssh + screen + Emacs), I used other terminal emulators. Konsole was part of KDE. aterm was simpler than xterm. xterm seemed promising because of the option of using uxterm for UTF-8.

My browser is Firefox because of all the extensions. I tried Flock and Safari. Before that I used the w3m text browser. A modern browsers gives us access to WikiSoftware.

Thumbnails & pictures: These days I use iPhoto to store and view my pictures. Before that I used GImageViewer (gimv). And before that I used xzgv to view images & Imagemagick to edit images.

I use Gimp to edit my pictures, and I use Inkscape to create diagrams.

These days I use OSX at home. Before that, I used various other window managers. xcfe looked less overloaded. KDE looked nice and I had the raw computing power to actually enjoy it. sawfish was programmable in rep, a Lisp dialect inspired by EmacsLisp. Window Maker let me build a menu of icons by dragging them; very cute. ratpoison had no windows. Check out one of the reviews. All windows are permanently maximized. (This is a pain when you want to use The Gimp…)

In the old days, I also needed a control panel. fbpanel was my launchpad before switching to KDE which came with a toolbar and taskbar. fspanel was simpler. gnome-panel seemed powerful and configurable by drag and drop.

I used SlackWare because a single person fixes it until it is perfect. Sure, the distro is much much smaller than a Debian system, but no hassles. Debian was great because updating via the Internet has never been easier. (→ LinuxLog)

All the GNU/Linux distributions I tried had problems with new hardware, however. So now I’ve moved on to a Mac. Let’s hope the situation improves for free operating systems!